King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Oddments

Holy smokeballs, King Gizzard have gone and done it again. Mere months off the back of their last record (Float Along/Fill Your Lungs), the self-described theremin wielding psychopaths have knocked us off our seats with yet another psychedelic punch. This one’s called Oddments and, as existing Gizzard fans will have come to expect, it’s a ripper.

For those whom this constitutes a primary introduction, welcome. I thud your shoulderblade in a comradely manner and usher you, like a humble Oompa Loompa, through the grey curtain of wherever else you were supposed to be today and into a world of drooling fuzz and colour. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are creating some of the best music going around at the moment, I’m not kidding (or even exaggerating). It’s raw, it’s rough-around-the-edges, it’s sure of itself and most of all, it’s really (really) fun. It’ll pull twisting, head-shaking contortions from corners of your dance repertoire that you weren’t, and perhaps never would have been aware existed had you not stumbled into their wonderfully chaotic fray.

Oddments jumps into the ring with all teeth bared. “Alluda Matata” is like a stack of broken televisions all stacked on top of one another, playing a variety of statics and and mashed-up keyboard, warbling out to lost-signal silence. “Vegemite”, the third track, is a tongue-in-cheek ode to the Australian nation’s favourite yeasty spread (watch the slightly creepy film clip, and you won’t look at your white sandwich slice the same way again). “Work This Time” is one of the gentlest things I’ve heard thus far from the Gizzard, a feather floating across candy hillsides – and then swiped away by the bear-fist seventeen-second nonsensenoise of “ABABCd”. There’s definitely some Frank Zappa feeling in all of this commotion, particularly so in “Hot Wax”. The whole thing sounds fried, as though the wobbly heat waves that rise from highway bitumen on a hot day have been caught in a glass jar by a shaman, then put to vinyl – and it’s the same with the cover art, which is one colourful extended quiver.

Oddments makes impressively significant departures from its predecessors, especially considering that they were conceived and set afloat onto the world’s high seas in such tight temporal proximity. If I’ve got stars to give, then I’m tossing them around the place like it’s Super Mario World. Nice, one, Gizzard.

Not only have the boys been invited across to Texas to flaunt their audible hotpants at the legendary Austin Psych Fest in May, but they’re also going to be playing a string of Australian dates for our earnest ears before they leave. If you’re in Aus, you can catch them here: